Main menu

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

Cisco Bids to Solve WebRTC Video Codec Battle

The vendor will open-source its H.264 implementation, hoping for consensus and backward-compatibility in WebRTC video.

One of the challenges as WebRTC rolls out has been the question of which video codec will be incorporated in the standard. Google, the creator and driving force behind WebRTC, included and has been pushing for the VP8 video codec, instead of the much more commonly-deployed H.264. In the meantime, licensing has been the main issue blocking H.264's inclusion in WebRTC. Now that obstacle has been removed.

Cisco announced today that it would take its internal H.264 implementation and open-source it under the BSD, and will compile the code into a "binary module" that can be included in any browser maker's implementation of WebRTC. Cisco further stated that Mozilla has agreed to do just this, effectively ensuring that H.264 encoding and decoding will be a part of future Firefox releases.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco CTO of cloud collaboration, said that clearing the path for H.264 inclusion in WebRTC is the quickest and surest way to get to video interoperability with the standard.

"Like it or not, there’s just a lot of H.264 out there," Rosenberg told me in a phone briefing. All of Cisco’s current-generation video products are based on H.264, and "H.264 is the foundation for video on the Internet." He added that it "risks the success of WebRTC as a whole" if it doesn’t support H.264.

The rapid migration to cloud services and applications has created a critical need for new strategies and technologies to keep data secure. In this survey, IT security professionals offer insight on their plans for securing data in the cloud. The survey will reveal how quickly cloud services and applications are expanding, the tools and services that organizations are employing to protect them, and enterprise plans for deploying next-generation cloud security technologies such as encryption, identity management, and cloud access security brokers.